64 is OK. I can get my stuff running under 64 without much trouble. The JVM only imposes an 8mb overhead or thereabouts. Still, RAM is cheap as chips these days. Any nextgen console is going to have rather more of the stuff.

Okay I dont know much but I do know John Carmack is the steve mchawking of game programming and an equivalent of einstein in the game programming field. He may not completely explain everything he says which gets him in trouble but of everything Ive ever heard him say he has never been wrong. You need to realize when he says java is slow he is looking at it from a assembly low level its not as fast as it could be point of view. He is also generalizing obviously he doesnt mean java in its entirety he meant more parts of java in particular. Do you realize in DOOM 3 he made his own heap that was 2 to 7 times faster than microsofts one that comes with VC 6.0? Back in the day of wolfenstein and Doom you had to actually know assembly, and there were no books you had to know what you were doing space and memory were critical not important. He knows his stuff.

Whether it's a joke or not, abcdefg exemplifies the typical user/developer perspective that is now the larger part of the to-be game developers. Which is exactly what I was trying to explain in my earliest post here. Illustrative narratives almost always communicate better!

You can't compare Carmack to Einstein.. Einstein was just insanely far ahead of his peers.Comparing him to Hawking is more reasonable, imo. There's no doubt he's one of the best, but external factors[1] have helped build a hype around him, making people think he's far better than he is.

[1] In the case of Hawking, his medical condition. In the case of Carmack, Wolfenstein 3D and Doom.

Carmack has been wrong, I think what I meant to say was that for how many tough calls he makes he is wrong a very small amount of times. I think comparison to Einstein is a valid comparison. Its arguable that Carmack was vastly ahead of his peers. The leaps his engines made might have taken many many years if not for him. Just like someone eventually would have probably came up with einsteins theories had einstein not did it. Im not sure about external factors, if you look at his record he has made revolutions every step of the way I would say its a proven track record.

Wolfenstein 3D was not revolutionary new technology.It was controversial, pretty, fast and fun, and a great game in general, but it was technologically inferior to ultima underworld.

Doom probably was revolutionary new technology. Everything from the netcode to the clever and trendsetting use of BSP trees (some people still bother with it today!) just reeks of brilliance.Combine that leap in technlogy with an extremely well designed game, and you've got an instant hit.

Quake definitly was revolutionary new technology. Carmack bitch-slapped the entire game industry so hard people are still hurting.To put it in perspective; Quake was released the same year as Duke Nukem 3D. And Ken Silverman is not a bad programmer.

Quake 2 and Quake 3 were minor updates to the quake engine. They were still the best engines around, but they were not revolutionary or years ahead of the competition.. the Unreal engine comes to mind. It was actually more advanced than the quake 2 engine, but lacked a fun game to go with it.(To be fair, it did came out one year later than quake 2).

Carmack is your average skilled programmer. Its just that programmers these days suck in general - so there are very few skilled programmers around . Carmack is simply well known because the media like the whole story of id's success. Now he gets special treatment (e.g. from graphics card vendors) so he isn't even on a level playing field with his peers.

for how many tough calls he makes he is wrong a very small amount of times. I think comparison to Einstein is a valid comparison. Its arguable that Carmack was vastly ahead of his peers. The leaps his engines made might have taken many many years if not for him.

*cough* b***s*** *cough*

Carmack never did anything special. His innovations were *no better* than the innovations other people did (look at what Bullfrog were doing at the same time, for an easy example - different tricks, similar effectiveness, often much more impressive results).

Carmack got lucky / hit a sweetspot. He did little special other than take advantage of that weird thing they call "Marketing" and which many of his lapdogs like to pretend doesn't exist. If they were to go and learn what marketing is about, and look what it does in other industries, they might get a Clue and realise that his success says little about his skill. There are others who, if you were being fair, arguably ought to have made much more money and fame out of id than he did, but whose names are forgotten.

You mean, it finally caught up to UU, quite a few years later, and although it had a higher poly count / further clip plane it didn't actually run on a 486 at all, where UU ran on a 386?

Again, IMHO, it was the game + the fame + the rep of Doom&wolf + the sales model + the publisher that came together to make Quake a huge success. It's not fair to say Quake had revolutionary technology.

You mean, it finally caught up to UU, quite a few years later, and although it had a higher poly count / further clip plane it didn't actually run on a 486 at all, where UU ran on a 386?

Again, IMHO, it was the game + the fame + the rep of Doom&wolf + the sales model + the publisher that came together to make Quake a huge success. It's not fair to say Quake had revolutionary technology.

UU was not as good as you seem to think it was.It had no multiplayer, it had a tilebased map, and didn't let you see more than a few tiles ahead.And I'm fairly sure it wasn't full freelook as it used flat sprites for the graphics.

Also, please note that I didn't say "doom was the first 3d game", or even "doom was the first textured 3d first person game". I said that the rest of the programming in that game helped set a standard to which people still today try to compare.

One can argue Carmack's ACTUAL achievements anyway you want, it doesn't matter because his critical mass is far greater than any number of posts anyone can make.

It is his perceived collective achievements that give his statements real power to affect other peoples opinions/perspectives. And, unfortunately, any amount of careful retort from anyone of lower status than him will have little measurable affect.

The best one can hope to do is to help clarify what he said, and what he didn't say, to "correct" his misrepresentations.

Carmack is just a good succesful programmer, I wouldn't call him a genius, nobody needs a cult of personality.Einstein was a good scientist who happened to be at the right place at the right time and got famous, I wouldn't say he was "miles ahead" of the "competition".Both of them used ideas that were floating around at the time, scientific breakthroughs never come from a singular person.There are far more serious intelligent hard-working people than what the media tell us.

The point is not that somebody out there may be "better" or "wiser" than JC or that he was "just" using ideas floating around...the point is: He wrote Wolfenstein, Doom, QuakeX and Doom3. Not me, not you, not even the Ultima Underworld guys... And that alone puts him "miles ahead" of the competition. That doesn't mean mean that he's always right of course. But he gets his stuff done and then he talks. A lot of other people just talk and never get anything done.

If we reduce a game engine to one of its features (in JC case graphics) im sure we will find many game engines that were the best at a particular feature at a certain time. JC was not the only one in this situation but he did excelled in optimizing the most critical features to sell games. Im afraid this is what most people don't realize and this is what the guy was talking about when he compared games to porno in a pictoric way of course.

Doom RPG might look a whole lot like the first-person shooter it's based on, but this is actually a turn-based game. You can move one square at a time, and if there are any active enemies in the vicinity, they'll take their turns as well. Some actions, such as rotating your viewpoint--which is done at 90-degree angles--don't cost you a turn, so you've got plenty of time to survey your surroundings. The strategy of the game is to try to make enemies waste their turn on moving into your line of fire and then give them the business with one of your many weapons. Some enemies, however, are able to move into your view and attack in the same turn. Knowing the difference between the two is key to your survival.

He's got buissiness sense. Very few mobiles have the CPU needed to run a proper 3d game, and none of them have a good enough set of buttons to support any kind of twitch gaming (especially Doom games, which require more buttons).

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